Confirmation Then and Now (Christian Initiation)

Hillenbrand Books, January 2005. Paper Back. New. In this sequel to <i>Baptism in the Medieval West</i>, Fisher tackles the notoriously difficult issue of the origin of confirmation and its relation to the early practice of anointing and laying on of hands immediately after baptism. Beginning with the earliest post-Apostolic writings, Fisher finds pieces of evidence for the immediate sequence of baptism and anointing, evidence which becomes explicit early in the third century in Tertullian and Hippolytus, increasing in frequency in various sources into the fourth century. After a survey of the practice in Africa, Egypt, Jerusalem, and Syria, where we know even clearer attestation (e.g. Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem) focus shifts to the West, where he finds the origin of later practice of a rite distinctly called confirmation in fifth-century Gaul, and the beginnings of an increasing separation between baptism and confirmation. In a concluding chapter, Fisher finds that different practices of confirmation (especially the Reformation insistence that confirmation as a public confession of faith precede admission to the Eucharist) signal diverging understandings of sacramental grace. As the preface felicitously puts it, ''Fisher was not the first to explain the historical development of the rite of confirmation. But he was the first to do it in a way that was scholarly, readable, and gently opinionated.''